Y’all take it easy now.
This isn’t Dallas. It’s Nashville. This is Nashville. You
show ’em what we’re made of. They can’t do this here
to us in Nashville. OK, everybody,
sing. Come on somebody, sing. You sing.
—Haven Hamilton, after
Barbara Jean
is shot, Nashville

The
anthem sung by the crowd following the impassioned plea above, as Robert Altman’s
film comes to its piercing end, is a peculiar—and peculiarly American (this
is Nashville, after all)—circling of the affective wagons. The chorus resounds
in oxymoronically defiant resignation: “It
don’t worry me. It don’t worry me./You
may say that I ain’t free,/But it don’t worry me.”

Robert
Altman never won an Academy Award. But, then again, neither did Hitchcock
or Chaplin or Lubitsch or Hawks or Welles, although
they all received honorary Oscars, those “lifetime achievement” consolations
meant to assuage Hollywood’s easily assuageable
guilt and to camouflage the stupidity, cynicism, and (worst of all) thermonuclear
envy that has always driven its prizegiving. Altman got his last year. He was gracious, but
also unsparing, if in a characteristically indirect way: “Of course I was happy and thrilled…to accept
this award. And I look at it as a nod to all of my films because, to me, I’ve
just made one long film. And I know some of you have liked some of the sections,
and others you….Anyway, it’s all right.”

Well,
no, it wasn’t, and isn’t, but there’s nothing to be done for it now. Altman
won’t be making any more movies, as he died last November, and so Hollywood
won’t get another chance to make amends. But Tinseltown’s
tough. Besides, as Altman once explained, “They sell shoes and I make gloves.”
If anything, it’s a miracle the cobblers let him make his handwear
for so long.

Nashville was released on June 11, 1975, exactly
five weeks to the day after the fall of Saigon on April 30. Less than nine
months earlier, on August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon had resigned from the presidency.
That’s what you call overdetermined. If there was
a zeit to the geist
of American cinema in the Seventies, it was Robert Altman, although, ironically
(or, maybe, pointedly), he had turned 50 a few months before Nashville’s
premiere.

***

Those people who make love
while saying: “We’re going
to have a magnificent child”; well, they won’t have
a magnificent child, they may not have any child
at all that evening….The magnificent child comes
by chance, one day after a good laugh, a
picnic, fun in the woods, a roll in the hay, then
a magnificent child is born!
—Jean Renoir

Renoir
was, of course, the greatest filmmaker ever known, both in his own time and
well after his genius was universally recognized, as an “incompetent.” Writing
more than a decade after Renoir’s death, even Andrew Sarris referred to the
“lapses and longueurs” in his work. Despite Sarris’s oft- and effusively documented admiration for Renoir,
he, too, could feel that the director’s results were often so “messy” that,
arguably, none of his films could be considered “well made” (see “The Magnificent
Child,” The New York Times, March 25, 1990).

Of course,
“well made” is in the eyes of the beholder, just as one person’s mess is another’s
riches. To take the most famous “mess” in the history of cinema, even if The
Rules of the Game hadn’t suffered its infamous butchery because of distributors
and producers (and censors) that relegated almost a third of it to the cutting-room
floor, it seems so fractured, so disordered, even today (when it has
been more or less restored) that a first viewing of it is exceptionally disorienting.
But that’s exactly the point, not only to this work, but to every movie Renoir
ever made.

There
is a reason Renoir is the greatest naturalist in the history of filmmaking
and why, moreover, he is a much greater artist than his father, whose work
imprisoned him in a sentimentality that might have been inadvertent but was,
ultimately, an inevitable consequence of an emotional entrapment that arose
directly from his art. For the son, however, the depiction of the human world
meant exactly that: surveying an affective, social, and—something that was
always enormously potent for him—environmental topos
that could only be determined to the extent it was recorded. This is naturalism
shorn of ideological presumption and certainly liberated from sentimental
prescription. This is the world as it is: complex, contradictory, often inexplicable,
and usually impervious to arbitrary attempts at explanatory order. In other words, “messy.”

Put
another way, this is the world seen agnostically: layered, diffuse, inconstant,
self-defining, but, in the end, accessible to us, even if not particularly
familiar or amenable to uncomplicated understanding. Lapses?
The camera in Renoir’s films is so often not where it “should” be because
human understanding is so often a result, not to say a function, of accident
rather than purpose. Renoir’s editing is also frequently less than “seamless,”
but, then, human consciousness is repeatedly jarred into comprehension, as
the confrontation between being and otherness almost habitually results in
disjunction rather than connection. As for his “longueurs,”
what makes human relations so poignant if not the cumulative paralysis of
men and women frozen by their very need to communicate with one another? What
is psychoanalysis, in the end, but an endless “longueur”?
Indeed, it is precisely Renoir’s longueurs that
make his work so utterly, and consistently, revelatory, if for no other reason
than that silence is the most ancient and effective form of expression, in
its directness even more so than in its ambiguity.

And
then, of course, there is Renoir’s roving camera and depth of field. Well,
yes, getting at “truth”—as much as it can be established—is a bit of a bother.
You’ve got to figure out which cranny to look into, which hint to follow,
which “obvious” and “self-evident” truth is no more than strategic mendacity
and self-interest disguised as moral certitude. There’s a reason why classical
decoupage—i.e., Hollywood’s esthetic of (apparent) continuity and
contiguity, of shot/reverse-shot, master and cover shots—is the most effective
form of propaganda ever conceived by the human mind: it works. Which is to say, it deceives. One’s mind—one’s entire affective
universe—is guided in a way that only music can duplicate (something that
Ingmar Bergman always understood), except that the
movies’ narrative singularity give them a power (and verisimilitude) that
music cannot begin to compete with.

As
the two dominant paradigms of filmmaking, editing and mise
en scène (to use shorthand to denote visual style in the frame,
as opposed to one based on the relationship of frames), are both famously
associated with left-wing filmmakers (Eisenstein and Renoir, respectively),
ideology doesn’t help much in explaining artistic structure. Furthermore,
any theory of art claiming greater (or more “authentic”) reality is, fundamentally,
belied by the fact that art is always artifice, and making art a series of
subjective interventions on (against?) the objectivity (and innate contingency)
of the world. Which is obviously why there’s also no such thing as documentary
filmmaking per se, let alone “direct
cinema” or “cinéma vérité.”
The best we can hope for is honest self-consciousness on a filmmaker’s part,
so that the nature of his or her deception is both transparent (which
transparency, of course, is precisely what classical decoupage strives so
hard to conceal) and, even more so, of a mimetic quality that reproduces,
even if only in the faintest form, the actual perception (and perceptual obstacles)
of human beings in the world, as opposed to outside of it, literally
watching it roll on—a physical impossibility in “real life,” but precisely
the position in which most movies always put us.

The
critical problem is (accounting for) the world’s contingency. How does an
honest filmmaker depict what’s what in the world, and why that is? Renoir’s
answer was also his response to classical decoupage: a redefinition of the
temporal (continuity) and spatial (contiguity) as emanating not outside but
inside the frame—in other words, through the camera, as opposed to on the
flatbed (and to decoupage, be it classical, Eisensteinian,
or otherwise).

This
is the world of messy movies, of lapses and longueurs.
Of a realism that is the closest film will ever get to reality, of a naturalism
that is as faithful to—and structurally mimetic—of natural contingency, if
not exactly nature, as artifice can ever be. This is the cinema of Renoir
and Robert Altman, in which what happens, happens, not because it must but
because it will.

***

“Remember,
son,” Buffalo Bill counsels his nephew in Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson, “the
last thing that a man wants to do is the last thing he does.” When he died,
Altman was in preproduction for his next (quintessentially Altmanesque)
project, a fictionalized remake of the 1997 documentary, Hands on a Hardbody.
This was, after all, the man who, when asked about it, likened retirement
to death. Still, there is an eerily elegiacal quality
tohis
last film, A Prairie Home Companion: it almost seems to be a requiem,
not so much for a man as for an entire culture.

“We come from people,” Garrison
Keillor says early on in the movie, “who brought
us up to believe that life is a struggle, and if you should feel really happy,
be patient: this will pass.” Hearing that line in the theater in Paris, where
my wife and I have been
living for the last couple of years and where we saw the movie, after Altman’s
death, I immediately thought of the lunatic euphoria in which Americans have
been sunk for the last quarter of a century since the dawning of morning in
America. It just seems that, somehow, in some way, the long, postwar march
from 1945 to 1980 had become, by that latter year, too difficult, too painful,
too demanding of general sacrifice and needful of genuine citizenship. Somehow,
in some way, by 1980, just five years after Altman released what is probably
his most resonant movie, the American people decided to collectively stick
their heads out the window, exhale, and scream—following the now-famous advice
of the film made the following year by Altman’s fellow fifties-something director,
Sidney Lumet—“I’m as mad as hell, and
I’m not going to take this anymore!”

As so
often before in the twentieth century, however, the injunction by an artist
to his fellow citizens to express and then channel their rage ended up having
radically different results from those intended. The
man elected fortieth president of the United States in 1980 was not the man
that that infinitely lucid ranter, Howard Beale
(“We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions….None of
it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all
ages, colors, creeds—we’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions
we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and
that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress
like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your
children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness.
You maniacs. In God’s name, you people are the real
thing. WE are the illusion.”) would have voted for, as he was the absolute embodiment of
the tube’s domination of American life. (It is vain but instructive to speculate
on what Howard Beale would have made of YouTube.)

So began
our excellent adventure of moral and existential deregulation (and ideological
re-regulation): from the Reaganite Eighties, when
greed was good, to the Clintonite Nineties, when greed was even better because
it was now “globalized,” to the Bushite Noughts, when greed just
wasn’t good enough and had to be pumped up by empire. There were hiccups along
the way (there always are in hostile takeovers)—a couple of towering Manhattan
infernos here, a Madrid train-station massacre there, mass murder even farther
away, in Mesopotamia—but, hey, “stuff happens,” to quote our former secretary
of defense.

And
yet, according to Keillor/Altman, we came “from people who brought us up to
believe that life is a struggle….” Well, yes, we did, once upon a time and
long, long ago. But we don’t believe that anymore. What we believe now is
that struggle is a burden, a misfortune—bad financial planning. That only
happiness matters in life (my happiness, my life), that happiness
is the sum total of human purpose, that happiness is the only goal
in a “goal-centered life,” to echo the autistic instrumentalism of America’s
professional purveyors of existential sedation. And what is “happiness”? Indefinable,
perhaps, but, like pornography, recognizable as such. Like pornography,
too, able to transform genuine desire into coopted,
commercialized, alienated—thoroughly exploited and therefore thoroughly exploitable—need.
Happiness as it ever was, except more so, excessively so, not merely
material, but freighted, not simply accumulative but a Himalayan swagheap,
as if sumptuary exchange is equal to, better than, sexual exchange,
which has now become so prosaic, so easy, so ubiquitous, so spectacular (as
defined by Debord, not DeMille), and, thus, so utterly boring that accumulation in
itself—massive, disproportionate, irrational, endless, verging on, indeed,
spilling over into, psychic disorder—is the only way to reconstruct our erotic
lives, is, in truth, the only eros we have left
in our civilization.

You
may say that we ain’t free, but it don’t worry us because we’re fat and rich
and happier than hogs in shit—or at least we think we are, which is all that
matters in the end. In Buffalo Bill and the Indians,
Ned Buntline explains the rise and fall—and self-deception—of nations (and,
presumably, empires): “A rock ain’t a rock once
it becomes gravel.” Later, he points to an existential chasm: “Injuns gear
their lives to dreams….The white men—they’re different. The only time they
dream is
when things are going their
way.”

***

It
is not hyperbole to say that most of Robert Altman’s films were about America’s
reveries, and of the delusions arising therefrom.
Altman made a lot of movies (about 50), a few of which deserve an entire volume
each. Suffice it to say that when future historians look back on the cultural
terrain of the last quarter of the twentieth century, M*A*S*H; McCabe & Mrs. Miller; Nashville; Buffalo
Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson;
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean; Secret Honor;
Short Cuts; A Prairie Home Companion, and about 40 other movies
together will constitute a chronicle of that time (and of the times before
and after) with which very few other accounts—artistic or academic—will be
able to contend for sheer poignancy and narrative power.

It is
telling of his global influence that three of the four filmmakers competing
with Martin Scorsese for the Best Director Oscar this year—American Clint
Eastwood, Englishman Paul Greengrass, and Mexican
Alejandro Gonzáles
Iñárritu—were honored for making
the kind of multilayered, multiperspectival movie
most associated with Altman. In Iñárritu’s case especially, the artistic
line from Altman is so direct as to be almost genetic. Not that multiple perspectives,
or apparently disparate stories coming together in the (usually terrible)
end, prove that Iñárritu (or Greengrass
or, to take another obvious example, Paul Haggis, who not only directed last
year’s Oscar-winning Crash but wrote Flags of Our Fathers and
Letters from Iwo Jima)
would not have made the films he’s made had Altman not made his. Indeed, Altman
himself was always the first to point to Hawks’s
influence when film illiterates credited him with “inventing” overlapping
dialogue. (“People talk about my signature, but I ask them
if they ever saw Howard Hawks’s films,” he inquired
of a Guardian interviewer last year.) In Eastwood, in fact, it is clear
that we’re dealing with an entirely different, and autonomous, esthetic (and
moral) model. (Letters
from Iwo Jima is not only a work of genuine genius and
uncommon complexity that will forever change the genre of which it is a part
and of which it has immediately become a classic, but a remarkable dissection,
of devastating lucidity, of the “American century.”) Still, virgin birth is
a theological concept, not a biological one and certainly not an artistic
one.

(Although
the less said about this year’s Best Director Oscar, the better, I have to
add that rarely has an honoree been so mismatched with an honor. Put aside
the fact that Scorsese got the award for what is arguably the worst film he’s
ever made—although with appallingly pretentious examples such as The Aviator,
Kundun, The Age of Innocence, and
The Last Temptation of Christ, that’s a hard call—or that he competed
against four other directors who crafted films superior to his in every possible
way. The problem is that he is the most overrated director of the most overrated
generation of directors in the history of American moviemaking. With the exception
of Francis Ford Coppola—whose The Godfather, Part II and The Conversation
both deservedly competed for the Best Picture Oscar in 1974 and are essential
works of American cinema in the Seventies—it is sobering to realize how much
less than first seduces the eye there really is in the work of the “iconic”
Gang of Four standing on the stage after this year’s Oscar for best director
was awarded.)

So,
what did Altman give to succeeding generations of filmmakers? Essentially,
what Renoir gave him: everything. “The Rules of the Game,” Altman once famously
acknowledged, “taught me the rules of the game.” I’ve always suspected that
this recognition of debt referred to more than moviemaking. In any case, Altman
shared with Renoir a sense of his own work. At the outset of this article,
I quoted Altman’s judgment that he had made “just…one
long film.” Renoir, too, believed that a “director makes only one movie in
his life” and then “breaks it into pieces and makes it again.” (A major problem
with Scorsese has always been precisely that the course from Raging Bull
to Kundun, and Taxi Driver to The
Age of Innocence, shows not so much “evolution,” let alone an unappeasable
and encyclopedic esthetic, as a confused and utterly unfocused sense of his
own work.)

Altman’s
most important inheritance from Renoir—in actuality the singular one, encompassing
all others—was the notion of plenitude, which is not merely an esthetic vision
but a moral one. I said before that Renoir’s perception of the world—and,
so, consequently, his filming of it—was “agnostic.” What I meant was that,
as opposed to so many other filmmakers, many of them as great as he, Renoir
did not approach the world as a problem but as a fact. Although he was (deeply)
a man of the left, he did not believe that human rationality could be imposed,
but, rather, that it could only be extracted from the social ecology (and
accretions of custom and cohabitation) that human beings had developed both
among themselves and, even more important, in active relationship with the
natural world into which they’d been born. The greatest illusion for Renoir
was precisely the notion that humanity could force any rules at all on the
world’s self-regulating game, which, for him, was always one in which society
was actively delimited by the realities of nature. Which was also why, in
the end, it was obvious that “tout le monde a ses
raisons”—although what is so often forgotten is the judgment that leads to
that brutal certainty: that that is “Ce qui est terrible sur cette terre.”

It
is ridiculous—a gross and utter miscomprehension—that this profoundly demystifying
and disenchanted artist is now lauded as a “romantic” or even an idealist.
Of course he was an idealist; what is any artist, after all, but a practicing
idealist? It’s just that he didn’t believe his ideals defined actually existing
humanity. He undoubtedly wished they would, but, in the end, it was more important
for him that human beings understood that, regardless of ideals, the world
was what it was, and had to be accepted as such. That was precisely
the meaning of his agnosticism. The world—our world, made up equally
of culture and nature—was, after a certain point, not amenable to reason,
but only to acceptance. Life is hard, and then you die. Except that (thank
the world for the small pleasures that are actually the greatest ones we can
possibly imagine) there are occasional days in the country and picnics on
the grass.

“I
just think, um, there’s so many people in the world nowadays, it’s hard for
Him to give the personal attention that He used to,” Sissy says about God
in Come Back to the
Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. This is Altman’s translation into American
demotic of Renoir’s agnosticism. Indeed, every aspect of Altman’s style—the
multiple storylines, overlapping dialogue, dense soundtracks, ensemble acting
and improvisation—confirmed an artistic and moral conviction that God is always
in those details that may or may not be discernible at first glance to us
mortals. It goes without saying that since this vision of the world was stubbornly
democratic, it was just as obstinately opposed to
the weird division of human beings into them and us, friends and enemies,
good and evil. In fact, as far as his own country was concerned, Altman believed
that everybody had a stake in, a right to, the American Dream—which, however,
was, time and again, more American than dream. “I
am the American Dream. Period,” Richard Nixon says in Secret Honor.
“That’s why the system works. Because I am the system.
Period.” Or, to echo Renoir one last time, “What
is horrible about this Earth is that everybody has his reasons.”